“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.”

— Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)

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Richard Hofstadter34

American historian 1916–1970

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